‘A Medical Emergency’: Why Gladstone’s maternity bypass should be the catalyst for nationwide change to the healthcare system.

Dr Gino Pecoraro, president of the National Association of Specialist Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (NASOG) warns that Gladstone’s situation will soon be mirrored nation-wide.

“The tragedy is that this is a straight line, it’s not even a circuitous route. When the private hospital closed down, as private obstetrics had become less affordable, people had no other option than to use the public system. The issue here is that the public unit was not designed to look after everybody, it wasn’t funded to look after everybody and it wasn’t staffed to look after everybody,” said Dr Pecoraro.